


You and Me

by friendlyneighborhoodsecretary



Series: I'm Never Prompt with Prompts [17]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Aunt May Being a Good Parent, Aunt May is the best, Gen, Hair Petting and General Comfort, It's Loving May Parker Hours, Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Sensory Overload, as always, lots of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:08:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23367469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary/pseuds/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary
Summary: There are a lot of things for May to catch up on once the proverbial spider is out of the bag. She just wishes that watching her boy suffer through his sensory overload headaches wasn't one of them.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker
Series: I'm Never Prompt with Prompts [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1558726
Comments: 20
Kudos: 91





	You and Me

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt: Cafune - the act of running your fingers through the hair of someone you love.
> 
> (With Aunt May as the secondary character, because I’ve seen this trope for Peter and Tony quite often, but almost never with May and that’s a cryin’ shame.)

When it came down to it, May didn’t know much about spiders. She knew they were small (like Peter) and spindly (also like Peter) and very talented at nearly sending her into cardiac arrest on a regular basis (the _most_ like Peter). Granted, that was less the fault of the species as a whole and more the fault of her own tendency to shriek when the jumpy little specimens that lived in the bathroom skittered across the floor of her shower when she was still half-asleep in the wake of an overnight shift. But still. She counted it amongst the precious few arachnid facts she could count on, day in and day out.

She sighs as she bags up a fresh sack of ice to replace the melty slush she’d just thrown out and wraps it in a clean towel. She wasn’t exactly sure how much of Peter’s DNA had been chucked out and overwritten with spidery traits and talents, but that one— _that_ one, out of all the possible things he could have gotten from the bite—had had to come through loud and clear. May loved her boy—endlessly, eternally, with every sequence of her own non-arachnid DNA—but someday he was going to give her the mother of all heart attacks.

“How’s the head, tough guy?” She kept her voice whisper-light as she settled onto her knees alongside the couch where Peter had collapsed once she got him home from school a few hours earlier. Peter gave a faintly miserable hum from under a battered set of noise-canceling headphones and a fuzzy sleepmask (complete with cartoon eyes and a pair of small reindeer antlers that marked it as a part of last year’s Christmas) of May’s, and May wondered, not for the first time, exactly how he’d dealt with all this before the spider was out of the bag. He had told her once, when all of this came to light, that his senses were sharper now. Dialed up to eleven. Piercing in their intensity even when he was careful and uncontrollably painful when he wasn’t—this, evidently, was what happened when that focus lapsed. A dizzyingly powerful headache that left him limp as a noodle while he retched into the toilet in a forgotten high school bathroom until May could come to collect him. But what had he done before May had known? Had Ned (for that matter, how long _had_ Ned known while she hadn’t?), who had been dutifully waiting with the school nurse to help the two of them ease Peter out to the waiting car, really been the only person there for him to lean on? Or had he even had that little sliver of comfort?

“S’okay. Gettin’ better.”

There are a million follow-up questions tumbling over one another in the back of May’s throat, but she gulps them back down and settles for fidgeting with the ice pack until it sits comfortably behind Peter’s neck. Peter’s brow furrows and she hurries to shift the ice again, just in case that’s what’s causing this new flash of discomfort, but apparently that isn’t enough.

“May? Whas amatter?”

“Nothing, sweetheart,” she murmurs. It isn’t true. There are many things the matter with their brave new world. Many things she’d like to fix, once she’s asked enough questions to know what needs fixing. But there are other priorities for the moment.

“You’re frowning.”

“And how do you know that, hmm?” She pointedly trails a finger down the center of the mask that covers his eyes and wonders if the other mask Peter wears chases away the sensory headaches, too, or if he had just muscled through the pain up until now.

“X-ray vision.”

May paused. Blinked. That wasn’t on the laundry list of uncanny abilities Peter had given her a few weeks earlier, but then most of those conversations had passed in a blur of shock and awe—she supposed she _could_ have missed one unbelievable thing out of the hundred she was presented with. Maybe she’d have to have him type up an actual physical list, just for future—

Peter let out a raspy chuckle, a wobbly grin crinkling his nose. “Gotcha.”

“You’re a punk.” May skims a hand through his curls, soft and careful and slow enough to be soothing rather than grating. Peter leans into it, tilting as close as he can without tipping off the couch. “You know that? An absolute punk.”

“Learned from the best.” He smiles as he says it, and May can’t help the quiet sigh of relief that leaks out of her. If he’s feeling ornery, he’s feeling better. There’s color in his cheeks again—pink rather than sickly gray—and the tension lines grooved into his forehead have smoothed ever so slightly. They’re minor improvements, but she’ll take them, all the same. “Really, though…you okay?”

“Pretty sure I’m supposed to be the one asking _you_ that, not the other way around, kiddo.” May keeps smoothing her fingers through Peter’s hair with one hand, settling into an easy rhythm as she leans forward to pillow the other arm on the couch. This, at least, feels normal. She’s done this since he was tiny enough to fall asleep in her lap rather than tall enough to take up a whole couch by himself. Since he had a head of wispy infant fuzz rather than the soft curls under her fingertips now. Peter lets out a drowsy, contented sigh, and May decides that’s one thing to be grateful for. Regardless of whatever has changed between them or whatever secrets Peter has kept from her in the last few months, at least he still finds having his hair petted comforting. He’s still her Peter. And because he’s her Peter, she knows he isn’t going to drop the subject long enough to get any rest until the nosiest of Nosy Parkers gets an answer. “I just…Is this what it’s been like for you all this time? Hurting, all by your lonesome?”

Peter freezes, although the only real difference is the abrupt shift in his sprawled posture from languid to tense. His throat bobs with an uneasy swallow and his mouth pops open and closed like a fish gasping for air.

“Um…I mean, it’s not…It’s not like I have headaches or anything _every_ day.” He flounders, and May has her answer. It’s a pang right down the center of heart, sharp and scalding and lingering in a way that she knows will keep her up at night for some time to come. Maybe it isn’t sensory headaches every day, but she has a feeling she’s missed more than she’s seen: patrol injuries and battle wounds, extrasensory overloads and the unyielding weight of guilt and loss that May wishes Peter didn’t carry. All of that bottled up inside one scrawny teenager who did his best to make sure it never spilled out onto anyone else. It’s enough to make May’s eyes sting. She isn’t a crier by nature, and nothing slips by her now, but it stings her into a pained silence that’s enough for Peter to notice. He tugs a corner of his sleepmask up by the antler to hit her with those wide, sincere eyes. “Honest, May—I’m okay.”

“You’re not. And that’s okay—” May sighs again and cranes over to press a soft kiss to his forehead. She keeps petting Peter’s hair in gentle, steady strokes, threading her fingers through the curls as if it’s the only way to keep him pieced together. She drops her chin to rest on the arm that’s propped on the couch cushions, nudging forward until she’s at eye-level with her boy. “—but remember that you don’t ever have to be not-okay by yourself. We’re in this together now…It’s you and me, remember?”

The words coax out the barest hint of a smile. The tension that had gripped him begins to ebb away again, and Peter leans into May’s touch all the more.

“Yeah…You and me.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you darlings for reading!! Feel free to drop a comment or concern below or to come hunt me up on Tumblr under the same name!


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